Media - The Huffington Posthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/media/
Media news and blog articles from The Huffington Posthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/03/andrew-lacks-return-to-nb_n_6795932.htmlAndrew Harthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/03/andrew-lacks-return-to-nb_n_6795932.html?utm_hp_ref=media&ir=Media
Tue, 03 Mar 2015 18:12:46 -0500http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/03/watchdog-group-asks-times_n_6795652.htmlGabriel Aranahttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/03/watchdog-group-asks-times_n_6795652.html?utm_hp_ref=media&ir=Media
Tue, 03 Mar 2015 17:40:31 -0500
The Times’ story, which says Clinton “may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record,” has come under fire for failing to specify which laws or regulations Clinton may have violated.

After the article was published, several journalists and outlets, including Media Matters, argued that the relevant Federal Records Law provisions outlining how private email should be handled were only finalized in 2014 — well after Clinton left office.

While the Times did report that former Secretary of State Colin Powell also used a private email account, rather than a government-sponsored email address, you reported that he did so "before the current regulations went into effect."

This ambiguous reporting left your readers in the dark as to how the current regulations differ and, critically, when they went into effect. Readers are left ignorant of the fact that it was 18 months after Clinton left the state Department that the Federal Records Act was amended to account for the retention of private emails used for government service.

*CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story identified Media Matters President Bradley Beychok as the author of the letter. ]]>http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rachel-tutera/in-defense-of-clarity-dignity-_b_6783514.htmlRae Tuterahttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rachel-tutera/in-defense-of-clarity-dignity-_b_6783514.html?utm_hp_ref=media&ir=Media
Tue, 03 Mar 2015 17:39:37 -0500Co-authored by Thomas Page McBee

At the end of last month, the Times published a story about a gender non-conforming person named Sasha Fleischman who was asleep on a bus in Oakland in 2013 when two teenage boys set their skirt on fire, resulting in second-and third-degree burns all over their legs.

You may notice our use of "they" here. "They" is the pronoun that Sasha uses and, as the writer noted in parentheticals several paragraphs into the story, the Times does not recognize this use of a plural pronoun. "Telling Sasha's story also poses a linguistic challenge," she admits, before going on to contort language for over five thousand words, so as to avoid pronouns all together. Because, as she explains, "Sasha prefers 'they,' 'it' or the invented gender-neutral pronoun 'xe.' The New York Times does not use these terms to refer to individuals."

GLAAD, citing a recent Pew poll that only 8 percent of Americans say they know a transgender person, noted recently that rest of of American learns about trans people through the media. "So when the media talks about transgender issues," they noted, "it is imperative they get it right."

Language matters. In a follow up op-ed, Margaret Sullivan quotes the writer of the story, Dashka Slater (who referred us to her comments here when we reached out to her), who notes that though her first choice was to use Sasha's preferred pronoun (xe), she eventually came to feel that "the lack of pronouns had the virtue of inviting people into a gender-neutral space without triggering the resistance or hostility that unfamiliar language often arouses in people."

We are two trans people, and we disagree with that approach. Though neither of us uses gender-neutral pronouns, one of us is non-binary, and we have both been the uncomfortable subjects of media narratives -- including within the New York Times itself.

As lovers of language, we appreciate that the New York Times has a style guide, like every media outlet. A style guide, much like the law itself, is meant to guide its subjects toward action that benefits the collective over the individual. In the case of pronouns, trans identities --which are only know beginning to receive respectful representation in media, despite existing since the beginning of time -- are particularly vulnerable to outright negative treatment or its cousin, insidious undermining. To not allow a person control of his, her, or their own story is to deny that person their humanity. Who we are to the world -- especially when our bodies are different -- is all that exists. If you don't believe our reality, and you have the power to represent it to others, you take away the mirror that allows us to see ourselves.

And this isn't just true for trans people -- it's true for anyone with a name, a body, and a history of marginalization. Native people in the United States endured many indignities, but one of the most cutting was forced assimilation, which often included stripping a person of their birth name. In media and until the recent Chelsea Manning story, reporters regularly chose to ignore trans pronouns until the trans person in question could "prove" that they'd "undergone their transition" which could mean anything from surgery to legal name changes -- all markers of the state, with nothing to do with our bodies or our hearts.

After the story about Sasha went live, the response was swift and harsh -- especially on Twitter, where trans people and our allies pointed, sometimes humorously, to some basic truths about language. Ivy Jane (@burgeroise) tweeted: "'Invented gender neutral pronoun' as opposed to the organic and pure binary pronouns harvested from the soil by kindhearted farmers." It was retweeted hundreds of times.

We hope that non-binary subjects are not always going to be people like Sasha Fleischman --subjects whose stories are told through the lens of violence they experience for being themselves. But the truth is, gender non-conforming trans people, and those among us who don't "pass" are at greater risk than anyone else in our community. According to a recent study by UCLA and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, people who report that others "can tell" that they're trans or gender non-conforming are at an elevated risk for suicide (42 percent for those who say people can "always" tell; 45 percent who say people can tell "most of the time"). The violence of erasing their identity shouldn't be yet another indignity they have to face.

We're in a fragile time for stories about trans and gender nonconforming bodies. On one hand, we represented with more nuance and sensitivity in media than any other time in history. On the other, we are in the age of Bruce Jenner, where gossip and speculation still turn stories about alleged trans identities into spectacles. The Guardian recently published an op-ed suggesting "they" might be a way to talk about Jenner, who has not publicly identified as trans. This is a good start to a broader conversation where the most decent act would be to not publish Jenner's narrative at all without input from the source. Basic journalism, yes, but also human decency.

Not too long ago, stories about trans people fit into one of three narratives: "A man in a dress was murdered," "This person was born in the wrong body, isn't that strange and alien?" and, if the outlet was especially liberal, "Meet this trans man or woman who has finally become him or herself, what an inspiration!" Thankfully, more voices and more stories and taking control of our own stories has highlighted a truth that should be obvious: we are one slice of a kaleidoscopic human experience, our differences not more or less than any human within the diversity of the human condition. To hiccup on them is to deny yourself your own humanity, just as you deny us ours.

We believe that, just as the tide turned with the three trans narratives, history will catch up with us here, too. It can start today, with the New York Times, which is the paper of record in the United States. As such, it has a great responsibility to report on this America, the one we all live in, side by side. To hide behind a style guide as if it's not a living document, as if "clarity" justifies prejudice, is not just offensive -- it's false. The clearest answer is the true one. Every journalist knows that. Report ours.

Thomas Page McBee is the author of "Man Alive" (City Lights) and has written about gender for the New York Times, the Atlantic, Vice and BuzzFeed. ]]>http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/03/the-hunting-ground-screenings_n_6794988.htmlTyler Kingkadehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/03/the-hunting-ground-screenings_n_6794988.html?utm_hp_ref=media&ir=Media
Tue, 03 Mar 2015 17:17:24 -0500The Hunting Ground," a new documentary examining how higher education institutions handle sexual assault on campus, the filmmakers told The Huffington Post on Tuesday.

Fifty-two higher education institutions already confirmed with RADiUS, the film's distributor, that they will host screenings on their campuses. That list includes several colleges under federal investigation due to concerns with how they've handled reports of sexual violence, including Brown University, the University of Virginia, Iowa State University, Dartmouth College, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Colorado-Boulder, the University of Kansas and Columbia University.

"The Hunting Ground" examines several college student sexual assault cases, including that of Erica Kinsman, who reported Florida State University quarterback Jameis Winston for rape in December 2012. The film then tracks how Annie E. Clark and Andrea Pino, two University of North Carolina graduates, worked with other activists to file federal complaints accusing universities of mishandling rape. The U.S. Department of Education is currently investigating how 97 colleges responded to sexual violence reports.

"With more than 1,000 invitations to screen 'The Hunting Ground' on college campuses across the country, it’s a promising sign of leadership and courage inside the ranks of higher education," filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering wrote in a statement to HuffPost.

"The Hunting Ground" debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January, hit New York and Los Angeles theaters last weekend and will air on CNN later this year.

Dick and Ziering are the Academy Award-nominated team behind "The Invisible War," a 2012 documentary about sexual assault in the military.

The following schools have confirmed they will host screenings of "The Hunting Ground," according to Dick and Ziering:

Brown University

Claremont McKenna College

Trinity College

Rutgers University

University of Delaware

Augustana College

Montana State University

University of San Francisco

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

California Institute of the Arts

Southern Oregon University

California State Polytechnic University Pomona

University of Iowa

University of South Carolina Upstate

University of Virginia

Loyola University New Orleans

Tulane University

Iowa State University

Spring Hill College

Ball State University

Assumption College

Adams State University

Bucknell University

Loyola Marymount University

Union College

California State University, Fresno

Dartmouth College

Lycoming College

Columbia Business School

Loyola University Chicago

College of DuPage

Lafayette College

University of Massachusetts, Lowell

Johns Hopkins University

University of North Carolina, Wilmington

Central Oregon Community College

Georgetown University Law Center

University of Colorado, Boulder

California State University

Santa Monica College

High Point University

University of St. Thomas

University of Kansas

Stanford University

University of Colorado, Denver

University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Walla Walla Community College

George Mason University

Southern Oregon University

Columbia University

Northwestern University

College of William & Mary

]]>http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/03/harpo-studios-closing_n_6795144.htmlJoseph Erbentrauthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/03/harpo-studios-closing_n_6795144.html?utm_hp_ref=media&ir=Media
Tue, 03 Mar 2015 16:30:20 -0500
Harpo Studios and the Oprah Winfrey Network made the announcement Tuesday. OWN recently moved into a new studio in West Hollywood, California, and work currently done at Harpo Studios in Chicago will now be done there.

Winfrey sold the Harpo Studios property in Chicago's West Loop neighborhood to a developer last year for about $32 million. She said in a statement Tuesday that Harpo Studios has been a "blessing" in her life and she's now "looking ahead" to inhabiting her California studio.

It's been fun to watch pundits try to add something -- anything -- of value to a worldwide discussion about a $77 dress. Google.com, for example, returned more than 29 million hits today for "TheDress", comments which seem to generally fall into three camps:

What the commentators have generally overlooked is the larger and deeper meaning of #TheDress meme.

#TheDress Is About Subjectivity in an Era That Is Both Global and Local

We live in an era in which everything is both local and global at the same time.

Traditional borders have been demolished by innovations in transportation, communication technology, the cultural influence of brands, and policy making. And yet social media, neo-tribalism, niche marketing, and the decline of liberalism have all combined to make it easier for online and real world communities to remain culturally and socially isolated from each other -- convinced that their opinion is the right one.

The global Islamic jihad movement and its counterpoint, the "Global War on Terror," are the most obvious examples of these trends. Both are instances of grand plans to implement a worldview that goes beyond the nation state. And both are led and acted out by players who are generally insulated within a narrow cultural echo chamber that reinforces perceptions of rights, entitlements, privileges and conceptions of "right and wrong".

Each side is unwilling to internalize the experiences and perceptive of the other, and therefore incapable of acknowledging how their own misunderstandings and missteps might reinforce and contribute to the problem. And these tendencies obscure what it is that they actually have in common: regardless of how you might view their methods, both sides are ultimately looking to create a just and equitable society.

The View From Here

Let's be honest. It's not hard to raise the bar on meme significance. Among last year's biggest and most discussed memes were a sexy mug shot of a prisoner, an athlete's impressive catch, the face of a musician in an unguarded moment, and the size of a celebrity's rear end.

Underlying these memes it's possible to see the faint trace of debates on race and ethnicity, the role of celebrity in culture, and how we define the masculine. And yet none of these are new or innovative debates. Haven't we seen and discussed the exact same thing over and over again, year after year?

#TheDress didn't really break the internet. But it also didn't really break the mold on memes. Instead it joins with other recent memes that have, for better or worse, all called into question the truth of what we are seeing. The Uma Thurman "What's happened to her face" meme is another good example of this, in which a powerful underlying subtext is really whether or not we can actually believe own own eyes.

Similarly, by focusing discussion on how and why people see things differently, #TheDress touched on what is perhaps the most crucial pillar of human life today: how our perspective is shaped by our sensations and our culture.

Subjectivity Is Inescapable

Yellow and white? Blue and black? Both? Actually, white and gold, it turns out. It was a just trick of the light and variation in viewing devices.

While the Internet can breathe easier knowing that one of the great mysteries of life has been solved, the niggling mystery of sensory perception continues. We may call this color white and that one gold, but how our eyes work with our brains to recognize these colors remains as subjective as flakes of snow.

The miracle of perception is not that we can see things, it's that we can tell others what we see so they actually know what we are talking about. We can meaningfully abstract our personal experiences and apply it to all manner of things, including our friends, family, tribe and community as a whole. This may be, in fact, why homo sapiens -- with our weak senses of smell, taste, touch, hearing and strength (at least, relative to other species) -- has managed to survive and thrive. We don't need to run every time we hear the snap of a twig. We can instead consider the context, implications and potential impact of possible decisions based what our senses tell us.

Subjectivity is an essential pre-occupation of the postmodernists, many of whom felt that the fact that we all see things differently means that, first, no one's view point is more privileged than another's, and, second, claims about the meaning of things can't be trusted without a thorough deconstruction of the cultural, social, gendered and political structures of the person making the claim. Phew, who has time for that?

But if all viewpoints are equal, and there is no objective morale "truth" to be found, how do we work together -- but less make the world a better place?

The Buddha knew this as far back as 2,500 years ago. Rather than argue that there was one path to Enlightenment, he encouraged followers to find their own direction, using his own experience as evidence of what is possible. What's most important, he added, is to defy the echo chamber of subjectivity by always testing an observation or decision against the needs of the greater good.

As he said,

Do not believe in what you have heard.
Do not believe in tradition because it is handed down many generations.
Do not believe in anything that has been spoken many times.
Do not believe because the written statements come from some old sage.
Do not believe in conjecture.
Do not believe in authority or teachers or elders.
But after careful observation and analysis, when it agrees with reason and it will benefit one and all, then accept it and live by it.

I think what the Buddha is ultimately saying is that meaning and significance is a co-production -- something we create for ourselves in conjunction with what we've learned from our community, and which we then share back to the community in the hope that others can put it to good use. The more people and perspectives we involve in this process, the more solid our notion of what is real will become.

Powerful stuff? You bet -- and I'd like to see more memes of this kind. What are some of your favorite memes and why? Share them here. ]]>http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/03/hillary-clinton-emails-nyt_n_6793700.htmlIgor Bobichttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/03/hillary-clinton-emails-nyt_n_6793700.html?utm_hp_ref=media&ir=Media
Tue, 03 Mar 2015 15:44:06 -0500New York Times report that suggested former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may have violated federal law by using a private email address for her official government communication.

The Times on Monday reported that Clinton "did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act." The existence of Clinton's private email address was first reported by Gawker in 2013.

Critics accused Clinton of failing to uphold her commitment to transparency by choosing which personal emails to turn over to the State Department for public record, as well as putting potential high value information at risk to hacking by foreign agents. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R), Clinton's potential rival in the race for president in 2016, immediately called on her to submit unclassified emails to public record.

A report by Michael Tomasky in The Daily Beast, however, cast a heavy dose of skepticism over the Times' reporting on the regulation that required officials to preserve email communications. A State Department official told Tomasky that employees were told in October 2014 that personal email should generally not be used for government business, but if it is, communications must be forwarded to a government account in order to be appropriately preserved. Clinton left the Department prior to that, in February of 2013, however.

"So if these new regulations went into effect after she left State, then what rule did she violate, exactly? And, if this is true, why did the Times not share this rather crucial piece of information with its readers? No one could possibly argue that this fact isn’t germane to the story. It’s absolutely central to it. Why would the Times leave it out?" wrote Tomasky.

Media Matters, a liberal watchdog group whose chairman David Brock is a top Clinton ally, echoed the sentiment by noting that President Barack Obama only amended the Presidential and Federal Records Act on November 26, 2014. "Among the 'major points' in the 2014 law highlighted by the National Archives was: 'Clarifying the responsibilities of Federal government officials when using non-government email systems,'" the group wrote. Bloomberg also followed up Tuesday, writing that the "measure wasn’t in effect when Clinton served in the administration."

Clinton's email account was hosted on a personalized domain, clintonemail.com, and was reportedly registered on the day of her confirmation hearing in January 2009. While former Secretary of State Colin Powell also used a personal email account to conduct some official business, current Secretary of State John Kerry is the first department chief to primarily use his government account.

Marie Harf, a spokeswoman for the State Department, told Business Insider on Tuesday that Clinton regularly submitted her emails to the Department when requested for proper record preservation.

"In response to our request, Secretary Clinton provided the Department with emails spanning her time at the Department," she said.

But that still doesn't address why, as Tomasky noted, Clinton decided to forgo a government email account entirely. It also fails to allay concerns that Clinton could potentially select which emails to submit for preservation, and therefore which emails to omit, without any transparency.

Reached for comment on Tuesday, a spokesperson for The New York Times pointed to Section 1236.22 of the 2009 National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which requires the Department to ensure that all communications are adequately preserved even if employees use a "system not operated by the agency," as in Clinton's case.

"Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency record keeping system," the law reads.

Michael Schmidt, the author of the Times story, also said earlier Tuesday that Clinton did violate existing State Department regulations.

“Explicit regulations were in place when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State that said they had to be retaining her emails on government servers in an active sense,” Schmidt said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." “The argument that Hillary Clinton’s side makes is, well, she was sending a lot of emails to the State Department so they were being caught. But what they didn’t address was the emails that she may have sent to other government departments, the White House, foreign leaders, friends, other Americans."

The White House on Tuesday argued that the details were best left up to the State Department, as it sets its own rules with respect to record management.

“It is the responsibility of agencies to preserve those records," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters at his daily briefing.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a liberal watchdog group that previously criticized the George W. Bush administration over missing emails, didn't have anything to say about the prospect of missing Clinton emails during her tenure as secretary of state. The Huffington Post repeatedly attempted to get comment from the group, which is run by Clinton ally David Brock, on Tuesday, but did not hear back after more than 7 hours.

The group felt much more strongly about another case of missing emails in 2007, when it lambasted the White House for failing to properly record email communications as required by the Presidential Records Act. Senior Bush advisers, including messaging guru Karl Rove, allegedly used Republican National Committee email servers for official communication that created a gap of over 5 million emails between March of 2003 and October of 2005 -- a timespan encapsulating Bush's re-election bid. Then-White House press secretary Dana Perino admitted that officials "screwed up" by not requiring the saving of emails sent using GOP campaign accounts.

This story has been updated to include CREW. ]]>http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/03/rush-limbaugh-obama-netanyahu-cop-choked-garner_n_6793930.htmlJackson Connorhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/03/rush-limbaugh-obama-netanyahu-cop-choked-garner_n_6793930.html?utm_hp_ref=media&ir=Media
Tue, 03 Mar 2015 15:18:19 -0500addressed Congress on Tuesday morning, outlining his fears concerning a potential nuclear deal with Iran to thunderous applause from lawmakers.

But according to conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh, the recent tension between Obama and Netanyahu is reminiscent of Democrats "trying to poison the jury pool" after the killings of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner. Limbaugh also said the president treats his Israeli counterpart like he's a white police officer accused of killing an unarmed black man.

"You look at how Obama has treated and does treat Netanyahu, you would think that Netanyahu was a white policeman from Ferguson, Missouri," Limbaugh said on his radio show Monday. "I mean, that’s the conclusion that you would come to. Or that he was one of the cops that choked Eric Garner, or he was one of the jurors in the Trayvon Martin case."

Limbaugh also said the Obama "regime" blames Netanyahu for its foreign policy woes, and suggested that the media lies to the public on the president's behalf.

"I find it despicable what this regime is trying to do with Netanyahu. But it makes sense; I know who they are. They don't like Netanyahu," he said. "This administration's foreign policy apparatus: Israel is the problem, just like in the rest of the world the United States is and has been."

"The fact is," he continued, "Obama is a footnote in history if the media hasn't continually lied for him."

How else to explain a 1998 episode of The Simpsons in which a guy who usually comes across as a doughnut-eating doofus stands at a chalkboard bearing a complex equation that prefigures the discovery of the Higgs boson.

“That equation predicts the mass of the Higgs boson” Simon Singh, author of the 2013 book The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets, told The Independent. “If you work it out, you get the mass of a Higgs boson that’s only a bit larger than the nano-mass of a Higgs boson actually is. It’s kind of amazing as Homer makes this prediction 14 years before it was discovered.”

Singh knows a thing or two about the Higgs boson, the elementary particle whose existence was predicted in the 1960s but not detected experimentally until 2012. In addition to being the author of several popular books about science, he holds a Ph.D. in particle physics from the University of Cambridge.

Mo'Nique leveraged her recent media blitz with an appearance Monday on “Good Morning America,” where she continued to express her thoughts on being “blackballed” by Hollywood after winning an Academy Award in 2010 for Best Supporting Actress for her role in “Precious."

“I had no idea, because I don’t think that Hollywood has turned its nose up to me. I think that those are feelings Mr. Daniels is having,” she said during the interview segment.

“And then he said, ‘There were things that Mo’Nique -- she didn’t thank the producers and she didn’t thank the studio, and that’s just not things that you do.’ Well, it had nothing to do with the producers nor the studio. Mr. Daniels had a problem that I didn’t say his name the night of the Oscar awards.”

“I appreciate that comment, because he’s absolutely right. It is show business,” she admitted. “A game does have to be played, but can’t we play the fair game? Why can’t we play the right game? If you’re asking am I willing to put my integrity on the line for Hollywood? No.”

Check out Mo’Nique’s “Good Morning America” interview segment in the clip. ]]>http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/03/netanyahu-boehner_n_6793464.htmlJason Linkinshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/03/netanyahu-boehner_n_6793464.html?utm_hp_ref=media&ir=Media
Tue, 03 Mar 2015 14:31:16 -0500the hot ticket for the social event of the season. But all the media attention focused on Netanyahu's remarks has made for the perfect opportunity to do a rare Tuesday Morning News Roundup. Here's what everyone missed.

1. House Republicans cave on DHS funding.

So ends that winsome melodrama. Days after Congress extended the final act of the "Will They Defund the Department of Homeland Security" saga by one week, House Speaker John Boehner is calling for an anti-climax. As Elise Foley reports:

Senate Democrats have already shown that they will not vote for a funding bill that passed the House in January. That bill would tie funding to ending President Barack Obama's immigration actions, which could allow as many as 5 million undocumented immigrants to temporarily stay in the country and work.

Now, the House is conceding defeat on getting immigration measures into the DHS bill. The vote could come as soon as Tuesday.

The center of this contretemps is a series of executive actions from Obama, implementing his policy preferences on immigration. At the moment, 26 states are suing the administration over those executive actions, a fact that Boehner cited in telling House Republicans there'd be a vote on a "clean" DHS funding bill. "The good news is that the president’s executive action has been stopped, for now," the speaker said. "This matter will continue to be litigated in the courts, where we have our best chance of winning this fight."

Shutting down Homeland Security is an option that Boehner on Tuesday deemed to be "untenable." Given his approval of the lawsuit lodged against the White House, it makes you wonder how a threatened shutdown made it even this far.

2. David Petraeus gets slapped on the wrist in a plea deal.

"The alternative to this bad deal is a much better deal," said Netanyahu of the current negotiations over Iran's nuclear future, on which the Israeli prime minister would like to put the kibosh. As if to emphasize the secret existence of really great deals you had no right to expect, the U.S. Department of Justice reached an accord with wayward military guru and retired general David Petraeus, who scandalized himself after it came to light that he'd shared classified information with his inamorata and biographer, Paula Broadwell.

The New York Times' Michael S. Schmidt and Matt Apuzzo have the story:

Mr. Petraeus will plead guilty to one count of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material, which carries a maximum penalty of one year in prison. Mr. Petraeus has signed the agreement, said Marc Raimondi, a Justice Department spokesman.

What's the over/under on "number of days Petraeus will spend in jail"? I'd advise you to go low -- this is, after all, an American Thought Leader. I'd sort of like to see some people at least apologize to MoveOn over this thing, as it seems only fair at this point. Speaking of:

Anatoly Kucherena, who has links to the Kremlin, was speaking at a news conference to present a book he has written about his client. Moscow granted Snowden asylum in 2013, straining already tense ties with Washington.

"I won't keep it secret that he ... wants to return back home. And we are doing everything possible now to solve this issue. There is a group of U.S. lawyers, there is also a group of German lawyers and I'm dealing with it on the Russian side."

Former Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) is heading for the door at the State Department, where he's been serving as the special envoy for the Great Lakes Region of Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Rumors are plentiful that his aim is to return to the Senate by defeating the man who defeated him (in a thoroughly ironic result), Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). That is no easy task. As Roll Call's Nathan Gonzales points out, ousting the senator who ousted you is a political trick that "hasn't happened in nearly a century."

After I leave the State Department this week, I will spend portions of 2015 teaching international relations and law at Stanford University. For most of the rest of this year, I will be living at my home in Middleton, Wisconsin, from where I will travel the state extensively. I will listen carefully to my fellow Wisconsinites talk about their concerns, especially those involving their economic well-being. I will also seek their counsel on how I can best further serve my country and the state I love.

Anyway, that's what you missed this morning if you were caught up in "Netanyahu speech" Twitter.

Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? ]]>http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-buice/how-brain-science-explains-the-dress_b_6793770.htmlMichael Buicehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-buice/how-brain-science-explains-the-dress_b_6793770.html?utm_hp_ref=media&ir=Media
Tue, 03 Mar 2015 14:13:21 -0500
Perception is a type of problem that mathematicians refer to as "ill-posed". Because of nothing more than light and geometry, a given image can have an infinite number of possible causes in the real world. Nonetheless, perception is a problem our brains must solve, so that we can find food, shelter, and each other.

Faced with this dilemma, the brain must resort to inference. Essentially, it must make guesses, albeit educated ones. One consequence of this is that while we all live in the same world, we don't always see it the same way.

Naturally, this leads to the beautiful diversity of human minds, for both good and ill. Recently, upon the electronic distribution of a picture of nothing more than a dress, it saw the birth of the stalwart White-and-golders and the die-hard Black-and-bluers. This dress is a nice example of how what you see isn't necessarily what you perceive.

Let's take a look, shall we?

So what color is it? White-and-gold or black-and-blue?

Since we have access to the raw image, we can peak inside at the pixel values to find that the dress is (on average) composed of the following two colors:

So, go team "bluish-gray-and-brown"!

Determination of color is based on a complicated inference, involving surrounding colors, local brightness cues and shape. Ed Adelson has some wonderful and now relatively famous brightness illusions on his website, such as the checker shadow illusion.

Color interpretation relies on the same kind of contextual inference as brightness. In Bloj, Kersten, and Hurlbert (1999) the authors demonstrated that context inferred from depth could change the perceived color of an object. They showed subjects a card, half magenta and half white, folded along the divide like a bi-fold pamphlet, so that the right side appeared magenta and the left side appeared pale pink, owing to the reflected luminance. Subjects report exactly that. When viewed through a pseudoscope, which flips disparity cues so that the crease on the folded card appears pointed towards the subject, subjects report that the left side also appears as magenta, rather than pink. The reversal of depth destroys any possible interpretation of this luminance as reflection.

Humans also have strong built in assumptions about perceived light sources. In terms of brightness, humans have a "light-from-above" prior that determines how we often interpret shapes. Loosely speaking, the sun is above us, and this fact is used to determine the perceived shapes of surfaces. Notice how the figure below appears to be a "bump" coming out of the screen rather than a dimple. If you are reading this on a phone, try turning it around and see what happens.

In the case of the dress, one's assumptions about lighting have a strong impact on the perceived color. In particular, your perception will be affected by whether your visual system sees the dress as being in bright light or in shadow. Comic book colorist Nathan Fairbairn put together the following in order to illustrate these two different potential hypotheses about light and color in the picture.

So what happens if we try to remove contextual information? It so happens that these average colors are close to being inverses of one another. Inverting them gives us:

Inverting the colors in the original photo should approximately "swap" the two colors on the dress, as well as remove contextual information (or perhaps render it nonsensical). The color inverted dress looks like:

I see white-and-gold here, and I saw white-and-gold in the original. My wife is a die hard Black-and-bluer, and she sees the inverted dress as light-blue-and-gold. Notice that the image now has artifacts that look (to me anyway) like damage in an old photograph. This is a sample size of one, so I'm curious to know if this inversion changes the perceptions of any other black-and-bluers out there.

We know that training can alter the "light-from-above" prior, and it seems plausible that people's differing perceptions of the photo are due to their different experience, and in particular their experience with light, shading, material, and overexposed photographs.

Our brains have to make guesses, but they don't always make the same guesses, even though we live in the same world. One of the hardest inference problems our brains have to solve is figuring out how everyone else sees the world. Perhaps with some very hard work, I can be a Black-and-bluer, too.

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Michael Buice is a scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. His research interests are in identifying and understanding the mechanisms and principles that the nervous system uses to perform the inferences which allow us to perceive the world.

This post is part of a HuffPost Science series exploring the surge of new research on the human brain. Are you a neuroscientist with an insight to share? Tell us about it by emailing science@huffingtonpost.com. ]]>http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/03/netanyahu-congress--speech-iran-nuclear-program_n_6793574.htmlRahel Gebreyeshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/03/netanyahu-congress--speech-iran-nuclear-program_n_6793574.html?utm_hp_ref=media&ir=Media
Tue, 03 Mar 2015 13:48:40 -0500address to Congress on Tuesday about the risks of Iran's nuclear program.

Netanyahu began his speech by lauding Obama and the U.S. government for standing by Israel -- praise that caused the room to erupt with applause. The ovation continued as the prime minister addressed the American-Israeli relationship and urged the countries to "remain above politics." The speech took a more ominous turn as Netanyahu discussed the Islamic State and the threat of a potential U.S. deal with Iran, but it ended on yet another high note when the Israeli leader exclaimed, "God bless the United States Of America" and Congress raved in support.

See HuffPost Live's look back at Netanyahu's moments of high praise from Congress in the video above.

Sign up here for Live Today, HuffPost Live’s morning email that will let you know the newsmakers, celebrities and politicians joining us that day and give you the best clips from the day before! ]]>http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/03/mocking-islamic-state_n_6790254.htmlSophia Joneshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/03/mocking-islamic-state_n_6790254.html?utm_hp_ref=media&ir=Media
Tue, 03 Mar 2015 13:34:22 -0500
Some people in the Middle East are striking back at the violent message sent by the extremist group also known as ISIS in its videos with satirical clips set to the group's infamous "anthem."

The song is known as "Salil al-Sawarim," an Arabic name that roughly translates to the "clashing of the swords," and has become a viral hashtag across the region. Most of the satirical clips are coming out of Egypt -- a country that recently mourned the murders of over a dozen Coptic Christians by the Islamic State -- and show dance scenes from famous Egyptian comedies.

When the Islamic State murdered Japanese journalist Kenji Goto, Japan hit back with its own brand of humor, doctoring photographs of executioner "Jihadi John" to show him holding a banana or a selfie stick instead of a knife, wearing Micky Mouse ears, and starring on a cooking show.

Here are a handful of the satirical videos circulating in the Middle East right now: